Paris Olympics Slammed for “Social Cleansing,” Mass Displacement, Militarization & Greenwashing

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show in Paris, where, just hours before the 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, a series of apparently coordinated arson and vandalism attacks were reported on France’s high-speed rail network, on the Eurostar, impacting hundreds of thousands of passengers. Tens of thousands are expected to stream into the heart of Paris today for the opening ceremony this evening, when about close to 7,000 athletes from around the world are set to sail on boats down a four-mile stretch of the Seine.

Meanwhile, protests against the Olympics have taken place in Paris ahead of the games, condemning the displacement of thousands of migrants, unhoused people and other vulnerable communities in a monthslong campaign by French authorities that activists have denounced as a “social cleansing.” Just yesterday, another group of hundreds of mostly African migrants sleeping on the streets of Paris were rounded up by armed police, forced onto buses, driven out of Paris. Displaced migrants have spoken out against the violence.

NICLETTE: [translated] The NGOs who take care of us, give us a place to bathe, food to eat, will shut down soon. And we don’t know what will become of us and where we will go during the period of the Olympic Games.

JOCELYNE: [translated] I have two children. And because we’re living on the streets, one fell ill with asthma. So it’s very difficult for me with the Olympic Games. We do all of our activities in Paris. What will become of us now? Can anybody find a solution for us?

KEMOKO SOW: [translated] Go to the train stations. You see, everywhere you go, there are policemen. Fine, they are here for security. But, for us, they are here to catch us. We’re afraid to leave our homes during these Olympic Games. You see, there are millions of undocumented migrants who are in France.

AMY GOODMAN: A migrant from Mali and voices of two Congolese migrant mothers. Hundreds of people also have marched on Paris over the weekend to protest the participation of the Israeli delegation to the Summer Olympics amid Israel’s relentless war on Gaza.

MARTINE: [translated] Israeli athletes’ participation in the Olympics is very shocking, very shocking, especially when we know what has been happening for eight months in Gaza. There are dozens and dozens of young Palestinian athletes who will never be able to participate in the Olympic Games. And they can say “thank you” to Israel for that, and the international community, because I think that Israel allows itself to behave like this because the international community has only been giving it little slaps on the wrist for decades.

AMY GOODMAN: More than 400 Palestinian athletes and coaches in Gaza have been killed or wounded by Israeli attacks since October 7th. Eight Palestinian athletes are competing in the Paris Summer Olympics this year, the most in history, including 18-year-old tae kwon do fighter Omar Ismail. Meanwhile, Amnesty International slammed French authorities over a policy banning France’s Muslim athletes from wearing headscarves.

For more, we go to Paris, where we’re joined by two guests. Jules Boykoff is the author of five books on the Olympics, former professional athlete. His latest piece for the Scientific American is headlined “The Paris Olympics Are a Lesson in Greenwashing.” He’s co-written several pieces on the Paris Olympics alongside sports editor at The Nation Dave Zirin, including their latest, “The Appalling Social Cleansing of Olympic Paris.” And Paul Alauzy is a Paris-based activist with the medical NGO Doctors of the World and an organizer with Other Side of the Medal.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I’m so glad you could both join us in a Paris studio, considering what has taken place today. Paul Alauzy, if you can explain what French authorities are calling sabotage of the high-speed rails? Almost a million people are affected. But then talk about what you’re calling “social cleansing” in preparation for these Summer Olympics.

PAUL ALAUZY: Yeah. Hi. Thank you so much for having us.

Well, I don’t have much to say about the sabotage this morning, because, obviously, we’re not meddled in this.

But our collective, more than a hundred NGOs, community association, we really lived through violent social cleansing for the whole year. So, in just a year, we had more than 12,500 people, homeless people, refugees, homeless, sex workers, drug users, people from Eastern Europe, who were expelled from tent cities, from slums, from squats. And it is a rise of 40% comparing to two years ago. And in just the past week, 300 people were moved yesterday. Five hundred people were moved from tent cities just last week. The numbers of expulsion towards the most marginalized population of Paris has exploded, and it’s because of the organization of the Olympics.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Jules Boykoff, if you can describe, set the scene for us, how Paris has planned for these Olympics and how extensive this is kind of, what you’re calling, really, ethnic cleansing is?

JULES BOYKOFF: Well, back in 2017, when Paris was bidding on the Olympics, they promised that their Olympics would be different. And I think the subtext there was they were going to try to avoid the problems that have become endemic downsides of the Olympics, and that is overspending, militarization of public space, the displacement of marginalized populations, greenwashing and corruption.

And unfortunately, seven years later, they’ve totally conformed to the plan. They’re 115% on costs overrun. They have militarized public space. I feel like I’m attending a policing convention here. It’s intense, I’m telling you. They also instituted a AI-powered video surveillance, that will be legal and used throughout the games. Paul just talked eloquently about the displacement that has been happening here. This has been a thorough greenwash. We can maybe talk more about that. And there’s numerous open investigations into corruption here in Paris related to bribery around the games. And so, they said they would be different, but how different are they, really?

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what you’re describing as the greenwashing. I mean, we’re talking about a week that has seen not two, but three of the hottest days on record in the world. If you can talk about what this greenwashing is about?

JULES BOYKOFF: Absolutely. Well, since the 1990s, the International Olympic Committee has really talked a lot about sustainability and trying to embed it in the Olympic Games. But a recent academic study found that some of those most recent installations of the Olympics, like Tokyo, like Sochi in 2014, like Rio in 2016, are some of the most egregious greenwashers around.

Now, in that context, Paris arrived. And to be sure, they’ve sort of tiptoed over that very low bar. They have limited the amount of fresh construction that they’re doing. They’re reusing materials, so a lot of the seats in the venues will be made out of recycled plastic. They’re leaning on wood. They have more vegan options in the cafeteria. But the problem is, this event is fundamentally unsustainable.

Let’s look at what’s happening in terms of Tahiti. They’re hosting the surfing competition way away in Tahiti. It’s 9,735 miles away from here. So we’re racking up lots of carbon miles to do that. Even worse, Amy, when they were creating the tower to allow NBC and other big broadcasters to transmit the best pictures of the surfers to the world, they brought a barge in that ran over the top of a delicate coral reef. And you can watch the videos online of locals in Teahupoʻo , Tahiti, just screaming out in agony and pain. I don’t know how that conforms to green promises around the Olympics.

And so, basically, what I’m saying to you is, in Paris, we’re seeing a sort of pale green form of pale green capitalism, if you will, when what in reality is required is a systematic transformation in resplendent Technicolor.

AMY GOODMAN: And let me ask you something, Jules. You’re an Olympic soccer player yourself formerly. I’m looking at an article right now about the 2024 Olympics, likely the hottest ever. Are athletes themselves prepared, dealing with the heat as they compete?

JULES BOYKOFF: Well, you’re right. I had the good fortune of representing the United States at the under-23 level.

And I’m concerned about athletes. Like you mentioned, these are some of the hottest days in the history of the world that we’re living. And if you want to understand why we’re having the Olympics in July and August, which are the hottest months of the year, it makes sense to think about the big contract that NBC signed with the International Olympic Committee. They paid some $7.75 billion for the rights to run the games through 2032. And guess what: NBC does not want to have the Olympics interfering with U.S. American football, which starts in September, basically. And so, that’s why they’re plopping athletes into this intense heat.

Last Olympics, we learned that athletes were forced to sign waivers that said that if they died of coronavirus or from heat exhaustion, that they couldn’t sue the International Olympic Committee. That’s the kind of situation that athletes have to deal with if they want to compete in the Olympics in the modern era.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at some facts and figures. Twenty percent of Olympic nations face extinction from sea level rise and extreme weather by 2030. Also, if you could talk about air travel, international travel, huge contributor to the impact of carbon — to the carbon impact on the games?

JULES BOYKOFF: That’s absolutely correct. Some 85% of the pollution and carbon associated with sports mega events comes from the travel. And that’s really not being sufficiently dealt with here in Paris.

If the Olympics or other big sporting events like the World Cup actually want to be green, there are a number of things they can do. One, they can make the games smaller. They suffer from something that some people call gigantism. Two, they can figure out ways of instituting measures that are more transparent for all of us to be able to see, like, what they’re doing. It’s quite untransparent right now in terms of what Paris is actually doing. There’s lots of things that could be done right, but we really need to scale back the size of these events, if we actually want to make them green.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Alauzy, I wanted to continue talking to you about the level of protest around Paris right now. I mean, there was a counter opening ceremony. If you could describe that for us?

PAUL ALAUZY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And also talk about the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, who is a socialist. And the swimming in the Seine of politicians to show that it is clean enough. Macron, the French president, wanted to swim in it, but people — well, you can describe what people threatened to do if he swam in the Seine.

PAUL ALAUZY: Yeah, sure. So, to talk about the organization around and against the games, it’s really tricky to organize against the games, because it’s a big propaganda machine, it’s very strong, and they have an insane security system around it. Of course they need to prevent any risk of terrorism. Nobody wants that. But for protesters and activists, it’s really tricky to do something.

So, during a year, we organized a lot of, you know, direct action to just pop up when the flame arrived in Paris, pop up in front of ministries, in front of touristic places. And we managed to do so and to have the images of the protests go around the world, which is good. But none of our asks to the Olympic Games, to city hall and to the state were really done, you know? The social cleansing continued and continued.

So, I spent I don’t know how many days being in tent cities and in leaving, expulsions along the Seine. And then we have politicians taking a bath in the Seine and making it the big society of spectacle, that, yeah, it’s amazing to swim in the Seine. So, a lot of French people threatened to — pardon me the expression — but to take a [bleep] in the Seine in order to prevent that and to maybe, you know, disturb the bath of our politicians. And, you know, they used $1.4 billion to clean up the Seine. We just ask for $10 million, $10 million, so not even 01% of that budget, to put an emergency plan in order to help the homeless and the refugees and all the population depending on Paris’s public space. And they even didn’t accept that. So, we can really see where the political priorities are.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you can talk about your organization, the Other Side of the Coin [sic], Revers de la Médaille? What does that mean?

PAUL ALAUZY: Well, it means that us, Le Revers de la Médaille —

AMY GOODMAN: The Other Side of the Medal, I should say.

PAUL ALAUZY: Yeah, exactly, the Other Side of the Medal. It means that we are not anti-Olympics. You know, I have a lot of friends. I come from a small village. They love the Olympics. They don’t know what’s happening in the streets of Paris. And they can cheer for it. That’s no problem. It doesn’t make them being people who are anti-migrants, anti-solidarity, anti-poverty. So we wanted to showcase to the people and spread the word around that you can support the games, but you need to know that they have a big social impact, and they come with a cost.

And they come with a cost of the lives of hundreds, thousands of people being mistreated, you know, people that go through migration. They went through Libya. They went through the Mediterranean Sea. They arrive here, and what they have is a police response. It is so violent to live through that. And the games, you know, they were so different 130 years ago. They were only for male. They were only for white people. They were even organized with the Nazis. So, even now after a year of protesting the games, I’m deeply convinced that if we continue to do so all around the world, we can still transform them for the better.

AMY GOODMAN: Jules Boykoff, if you can talk about the calls for Israel not to be included in the Olympics? Eight Palestinian athletes are competing in this year’s Olympics. Your co-writer at The Nation wrote in The Nation last year, quote, “Seven of them have secured what are called ‘universality places,’ which permit athletes from nations that have underdeveloped sports programs to take part in the games even if they come up short of formally qualifying.” Jules?

JULES BOYKOFF: Absolutely. So, first of all, at the protest, the protest that Paul organized last night, there was a huge pro-Palestinian rights presence there. I’ve seen it on the streets all around this city.

Now, if you want to understand the inclusion of Israel in the Paris 2024 Olympics, it does us well to slow down and compare it to Russia. In Russia, you have a country that will only bring about 12 athletes to these Olympic Games. Normally they bring upwards of 300. And that’s because of two reasons that the International Olympic Committee gave. One is that Russia violated the Olympic truce when it invaded Ukraine right after the Beijing Olympics and before the Paralympics, and, two, that they had violated the territorial integrity of Ukraine and, in doing so, took over four areas that encompass sports clubs from Ukraine, and the Russian Olympic Committee took over those sports clubs.

Now, in comparing it to Israel, I want to make it clear: History does not give us crisp facsimiles, identical twins, if you will. But there are very similar elements here. For starters, as you’ve been reporting today, the atrocities continue apace in Gaza, and we’re in the Olympic truce period right now. So, that’s one. And, two, you know, if you look at the stadiums in Gaza, nearly every soccer stadium has been totally decimated. The fields are unplayable. And moreover, probably the most storied football stadium in Gaza — it’s called Yarmouk Stadium — was taken over by Israeli Defense Forces and used to detain Palestinians and to interrogate them. Now, that sure sounds a lot like taking over the territorial integrity of Gaza.

And so, people are wondering, out loud here and around the world: Why is Israel not treated like Russians? Now, Russia are sending about 12 athletes here, and they will not participate under their flag. They’ll participate as what are called individual neutral athletes. And a lot of people have been raising the question: Why is Israel not also being asked to participate as individual neutral athletes? The International Olympic Committee has shown zero interest whatsoever in entertaining this totally reasonable question. And that’s why you’re seeing Israeli athletes participating under their flag and with their national anthem here in Paris.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Jules, you have been writing about AI and the use of it at the Olympics. We just have 30 seconds, but if you can explain?

JULES BOYKOFF: Sure. So, in March 2023, the French National Assembly passed a law legalizing AI-powered video surveillance to police the Olympic Games. The law is supposed to sunset in March 2025 after the Olympics, but, hey, it doesn’t take the imagination of an avant-garde poet to come up with scenarios by which the French government insists upon keeping that law in place. And this is in keeping with what we’ve seen with previous Olympics, where they use the Olympics as a pretext to get all the special weapons and laws that they’d never be able to get during normal political times, and all too often those special weapons and laws stay on the book and become part of normalized policing in the wake of the games. And I must say, Amy, normalized policing in too many places is also racialized policing, so you could argue that AI is actually increasing the racialized policing in a society.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both so much for being with us. Jules Boykoff, five books on the Olympics, a former Olympic soccer player, we’ll link to your pieces in The Nation. Paul Alauzy, a Paris-based activist with Doctors of the World and Other Side of the Medal. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.